Letters 119.1–120.13

I had already, in a few words, suggested the nature of my request to your brother, the holy bishop Alypius, whom I admire for all the virtues of the soul, hoping that he would deign to support my petition with you. But since the business that compelled you to go to the country estate deprived me of your presence, I preferred to put my request into a letter rather than leave my mind wavering in expectation; especially since, if you see that what I ask ought to be granted, the very solitude of the place where I think you now are may help your mind as it searches out the deepest mysteries. I had decided within myself once and for all that the truth about divine things ought to be grasped from faith rather than from reason. For if the faith of the holy church were grasped by the reasoning of disputation and not by the piety of believing, no one but philosophers and orators would possess blessedness. But since it pleased God, who chose the weak things of this world to confound the strong, to save believers through the foolishness of preaching, it is not so much reason that must be sought concerning God as the authority of the saints that must be followed. For certainly neither would the Arians, who think the Son, whom we confess to be begotten, to be younger, persist in this impiety, nor would the Macedonians, as far as in them lies, thrust down from the citadel of divinity the Holy Spirit, whom we believe to be neither begotten nor unbegotten, if they preferred to give their faith to the Holy Scriptures rather than to their own reasonings;

yet you, admirable man, if that Father of ours who alone knows secrets, who has the key of David, has granted you to penetrate the fabric of the heavens with the most serene gaze of the heart and, as it is written, to behold the glory of the Lord with unveiled face, declare to us, as far as he who gave you this kind of thought has given you the ability to express it, some portion of the ineffable substance, and strive with his help to express in words, as far as you can, the image of its likeness; for unless you are present as guide and master in so great a matter, our thought, as if with bleary eyes, is afraid to look upon it, beaten back by the flash of so great a light. Enter, then, into that most obscure cloud of the mysteries of God which keeps off our gaze, and correct the little questions in which I recognize that I erred in answering them, I who wish rather to follow the authority of Your Holiness by faith than to be corrupted by the false image of a reason conceived in the heart: correct them first in myself, then in my books.

For I, hearing and believing with a very cautious simplicity that the Lord Jesus is light from light, as it is written, “Proclaim well his salvation, day from day,” and in the Wisdom of Solomon, “For she is the brightness of eternal light,” believed (as far as one may believe, though I could not do so worthily) that God is the infinite greatness of a certain inestimable light, whose quality the human mind could not estimate, nor measure its quantity, nor picture its appearance, however loftily it thought; but that it is nevertheless something, whatever it is, to which belongs an incomparable form and an inestimable beauty, which at least Christ beholds even with fleshly eyes. Then, near the end of my first book, as you surely deign to remember, I wished to prove that the Lord Jesus Christ, that is, the man assumed, possesses divine power in such a way that the matter of the human flesh he had taken up remains; and when I had taught that in that inward being nothing but weakness had perished, the knot of this question was put to me: “If,” he says, “that man whom Christ assumed was changed into God, then he ought not to have been in a place; why then did he say after the resurrection, ‘Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to my Father’?”

So, laboring to prove that Christ is everywhere by power, not by body, by divinity, not by flesh, I wrote words of this kind about the unity of God and the trinity of persons: “God,” I said, “is one; the persons are three. God is undivided; the persons are distinct. God is within all things and beyond all things; he encloses the farthest, fills the middle, transcends the highest; he is spread out beyond all things and through all things. But the persons, consistent in themselves, are distinguished by their properties, not mingled by confusion. God, then, is one and is everywhere, because there is no other besides him and there is no empty place where another could be. All things are full of God, and besides God there is nothing. He himself is in the Father, he himself in the Son, he himself in the Holy Spirit; and therefore the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are not several gods, but he himself is the one God; and the Father is not the one who is the Son, nor is the Son the one who is the Holy Spirit. The Father is in the Son, the Son in the Father, the Holy Spirit in both; because in the three, distinguished in number, not in order, that is, in persons, not in power, the one and indivisible God dwells. All things that are the Father's are the Son's, and those that are the Son's are the Father's, and those that are both's are the Holy Spirit's, because they possess not as it were an equal but the same substance of deity, that is, united, not separated; and therefore neither precedes the other in majesty or age, because what is full cannot be divided, nor is there anything in fullness that could separate fullness and make a greater portion for one and a lesser for another. But in the persons it is not so, because the person of the Father is not that of the Son, nor is the person of the Son the same as that of the Holy Spirit. There is one power, which the threefold power possesses; there is one substance, in which there are three who subsist. The Father, then, and the Son and the Holy Spirit are everywhere by majesty, because they are one; by their persons they are only with one another, because they are three.” Weaving together other things of this kind, I carried the matter to the point of affirming that the persons are present and everywhere, but by the majesty which is one and the same above the heavens, beyond the seas, beneath the underworld. From this I showed that it should be understood that the man whom Christ assumed, though changed into God, did not lose the nature he had taken up, and yet cannot be believed to be a fourth person, as it were.

But you, a man to whom it has been granted, I think, to enter heaven itself by the subtlety of your thoughts (for he is truthful who says, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”), lifting the height of a pure heart above all the stars to contemplation itself, say that God ought not to be thought of as some body; for even if someone were to picture in his mind a light a thousand times brighter and greater than that of this sun, no likeness of God could be grasped there, because everything that can be seen is body; but just as we cannot think of justice or piety as bodily, unless perhaps we imagine to ourselves some female figures, with pagan vanity, so God too is to be thought of, as far as we can, without any imagery of fantasy. But to me, who can scarcely grasp in my heart the subtlety of your argument, it seemed that there is nothing living in justice as regards substance; and so I cannot yet think of God, that is, a living nature, as like justice, because justice lives not in itself but in us; or rather, we live according to justice, but justice itself does not live at all by itself; unless perhaps it is asserted that not this human equity but only that justice which is God is justice.

Hence I would like to be confirmed on all these matters, not only by the present words but also by a fuller letter. For it is not right that only our feet should be called back by your warning from this road of error on which many of us walk. For since many in the islands where we live, while proceeding along the straight embankment toward the highway, have run into the side-track of this crooked error, will there be any Augustine there to whose authority they will yield, whose teaching they will believe, by whose intellect they will be overcome? Or perhaps out of fatherly affection you prefer to direct me by a private admonition rather than rebuke me as a companion on a wrong road? But to me, who desire to run for the benefit of my soul rather than for the praise of the world, your reproof is not useless, and for the same reason not bitter either, especially since it will bring both life and praise to me and to others; for no one can be so unjust a judge as to prefer to brand me with folly because I once followed by-ways, rather than to hesitate to judge me prudent because I chose the right ones. For those whom the apostle Paul warned not to run uncertainly are not to be thought fools; he said, “So run that you may obtain.” Wherefore this road on which we are running must not only be abandoned by us but also be blocked off and cut off by you, lest perhaps it should deceive others too by a false pretense of love. For you have been chosen, unless I am mistaken, not as a reader of books already published by me but as a corrector of books still to be approved. For in the letter which I placed as a little preface before those little books of mine, words of this kind were written: “It has pleased me,” I said, “to steady the wavering skiff of our faith by the judgment of the blessed bishop Augustine.” Why then, you who are the summit of this teaching which is in Christ, do you hesitate to rebuke openly a son who is to be corrected henceforth, when the anchor of your judgment cannot steady us more surely unless it bites more deeply? For it is no light fault or question, in which the blindness of our thinking not only made no progress, but even, as you said most forcefully, incurred the charge of something like idolatry. I would like this to be examined by you cautiously and prudently, so that the serenity of your teaching and intellect may so wipe away the mist of our mind that what we cannot now think we may be able to see with the eyes of the heart, made clear by you with the light of understanding. May you, safe and blessed and mindful of us forever, possess the heavenly kingdoms, holy lord and most blessed father.

I asked you to come to us for this reason, that I was greatly delighted with your intellect in your books. And so I wanted you to read certain works of ours, which I thought necessary for you, not at a distance from us but rather here with us, so that whatever you might have understood less well you could ask about in person without difficulty, and from our conversation and talk together, as far as the Lord should grant us to bring forth and you to grasp, you yourself might learn what needed correcting in your books, and correct it yourself. For you have such ability that you can explain what you think, and such uprightness and humility that you deserve to think what is true. And I am still of the same opinion, which ought not to displease you either; hence I recently advised you, in the works of ours that you are reading at home, to put marks at the places that trouble you, and to come to me with them and ask about each. What you have not yet done I exhort you to do. For you would rightly be ashamed and reluctant to do this if you had ever once wished to and had found me difficult. I had also told you, when I heard from you that you were struggling with very faulty manuscripts, to read them in ours, which you might find more correct than others.

As for your request that I examine the question of the Trinity, that is, of the unity of the divinity and the distinction of the persons, cautiously and prudently, so that the serenity of my teaching and intellect, as you say, may so wipe away the mist of your mind that what you cannot now think you may in some way be able to see with your eyes, made clear by me with the light of understanding: see first whether this request agrees with your earlier definition. For earlier, in the very letter in which you make this request, you say that you had decided within yourself “that truth ought to be grasped from faith rather than from reason; for if the faith of the holy church,” you say, “were grasped by the reasoning of disputation and not by the piety of believing, no one but philosophers and orators would possess blessedness. But since it pleased God,” you say, “who chose the weak things of this world to confound the strong, to save believers through the foolishness of preaching, it is not so much reason that must be sought as the authority of the saints that must be followed.” See, then, whether according to these words of yours you ought not rather, especially in this matter in which our faith chiefly consists, to follow the authority of the saints alone and not seek from me the reason for understanding it. For when I begin to lead you in some way into the understanding of so great a mystery, which I shall not be able to do at all unless God helps within, I shall be doing nothing else in my discussion than giving a reason, as far as I can. If you demand this, not unreasonably, from me or from any teacher, so that you may understand what you believe, correct your definition: not so as to reject faith, but so as to see by the light of reason as well what you already hold by the firmness of faith.

For far be it from God to hate in us that by which he created us more excellent than the other animals. Far be it, I say, that we should believe in order not to receive or seek reason, since we could not even believe if we did not have rational souls. So, in certain matters pertaining to saving doctrine which we cannot yet perceive by reason, but one day shall, faith precedes reason, so that by it the heart may be cleansed to receive and bear the light of great reason; and this is certainly a demand of reason. And therefore it was reasonably said through the prophet, “Unless you believe, you will not understand.” There, without doubt, he distinguished these two and gave counsel that we first believe, so that we may be able to understand what we believe. Accordingly, it is reasonably commanded that faith precede reason. For if this precept is not reasonable, then it is unreasonable; far from it! If, then, it is reasonable that faith should precede a certain great reason which cannot yet be grasped, without doubt the reason, however small, which persuades us of this itself also precedes faith.

This is why the apostle warns that we ought to be ready to give an answer to everyone who asks us a reason for our faith and hope. For if an unbeliever asks me a reason for my faith and hope, and I see that he cannot grasp it before he believes, I give him this very reason, in which he may see, if possible, how preposterously he asks, before having faith, for a reason for things he cannot grasp; but if a believer asks for a reason so that he may understand what he believes, his capacity must be considered, so that, when a reason is given according to it, he may take as much understanding of his faith as he can, greater if he grasps more, less if he grasps less, provided only that he does not withdraw from the road of faith until he reaches the fullness and perfection of knowledge. Hence the apostle says: “And if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you; nevertheless, where we have arrived, there let us walk.” If, then, we are already believers, we have arrived at the way of faith; and if we do not abandon it, we shall without doubt come not only to such understanding of incorporeal and unchangeable things as cannot be grasped by all in this life, but even to the summit of contemplation, which the apostle calls “face to face.” For some, even the least, but walking most perseveringly on the road of faith, arrive at that most blessed contemplation; while others, already knowing in some fashion what an invisible, unchangeable, incorporeal nature is, but refusing to hold to the way that leads to so great a dwelling of blessedness, because it seems foolish to them, that is, Christ crucified, cannot reach the inner sanctuary of that rest, by whose light, as though shining from afar, their mind is already dazzled.

There are some things which, when we hear them, we do not believe, and which, once a reason is given us, we recognize to be true, though we could not believe them. And all the miracles of God are not believed by unbelievers precisely because their reason is not seen. And in truth there are things for which a reason cannot be given, and yet it is not that there is none; for what is there in the nature of things that God made without reason? But in the case of some of his wonderful works it is even expedient that their reason be hidden for a while, lest they become cheap, through knowledge of that reason, in minds languid with disdain. For there are those, and they are many, who are held more by wonder at things than by knowledge of causes, whereupon miracles cease to be wonderful; and they need to be roused to faith in invisible things by visible wonders, so that, cleansed by purity, they may come to the point where, through familiarity with the truth, they cease to wonder. For in the theaters too men marvel at the rope-walker and are delighted by musicians; in the one the difficulty astonishes them, in the others the pleasure holds and feeds them.

I would say these things to exhort your faith to the love of understanding, to which true reason leads and for which faith prepares the mind. For the reasoning that persuaded some that in the Trinity which is God the Son is not coeternal with the Father, or is of another substance and unlike him in some respect, and the Holy Spirit inferior in the same way; and likewise the reasoning that persuaded others that the Father and the Son are of one and the same substance but the Holy Spirit of another: these must be called things to be avoided and detested, not because they are reason, but because they are false reason. If the reason were true, it certainly would not have erred. Therefore, just as you ought not to avoid all speech because there is also false speech, so you ought not to avoid all reason because there is also false reason. I would say the same of wisdom; for wisdom is not to be avoided because there is also a false wisdom, to which Christ crucified is foolishness, who is the power of God and the wisdom of God; and therefore it pleased God through this foolishness of preaching to save believers, because the foolishness of God is wiser than men. Some of the philosophers and orators, following not the true way but one like the truth, and deceiving themselves and others in it, could not be persuaded of this; but some of them could. And to those who could, Christ crucified is neither a stumbling block nor foolishness; for they are among those to whom, being called, both Jews and Greeks, he is the power of God and the wisdom of God. In this way, that is, in the faith of this Christ crucified, those who could grasp its rightness by the grace of God, even if they were called philosophers or orators, certainly confessed with humble piety that fishermen had gone before them in it far more excellently, not only in the firmest strength of believing but also in the most certain truth of understanding. For when they had learned that the foolish and weak things of the world were chosen to confound the wise and the strong, and had recognized that their own wisdom was deceitful and their strength feeble, they were wholesomely confounded and became foolish and weak, so that through the foolishness and weakness of God, which is wiser and stronger than men, they might become, among the chosen foolish and weak, truly wise and effectively strong.

But to what does faithful piety defer with reverence, if not to the truest reason, so that we do not hesitate to overturn a kind of idolatry which the weakness of human thought, out of habit with visible things, tries to set up in our heart, nor dare to believe that the Trinity, which we worship as invisible, incorporeal, and unchangeable, is like three living masses, however great and beautiful, yet bounded by the proper extents of their own places and joined to one another in their places by touching closely; whether one of them is placed in the middle so as to separate the two joined to it on either side, or each touches the other two in the manner of a triangle, so that none is separated from any other; and that of these three persons, so great and of such a kind, though in very great masses, yet bounded above and below and all round, there is one divinity, a fourth something, not such as any of them is, but common to all, as the godhead of all, whole in all and in each, through which one divinity the same Trinity is said to be one God; and that its three persons are nowhere but in the heavens, whereas that divinity is nowhere absent but present everywhere; and that therefore it is rightly said that God is both in heaven and on earth because of that divinity which is everywhere and common to the three, but not rightly said that the Father is on earth, or the Son, or the Holy Spirit, since this Trinity has its seat nowhere but in heaven? When true reason begins to shake this construction of carnal thought and this empty fiction, at once, with the help and illumination within of him who does not wish to dwell in our heart along with such idols, we hasten so to shatter these things and in a way to shake them out of our faith that we do not allow even the dust of such phantasms to remain there.

Therefore, unless faith, which clothed us with piety, had gone before in our heart the reasoning of the discussion by which, admonished from outside, we ourselves perceive within, by the shining of the truth, that these things are false, would we not hear the things that are true in vain? And so, because faith did what belonged to it, the reason that followed found something of what it was seeking. So not only true reason, by which we understand what we believe, but even faith itself in things not yet understood is without doubt to be preferred to false reason. For it is better to believe what is true, though it is not yet seen, than to think that you see as true what is false. For faith has its own eyes, by which it sees in a way that what it does not yet see is true, and by which it sees most certainly that it does not yet see what it believes. Further, one who by true reason now understands what he only believed is surely to be preferred to one who still desires to understand what he believes; but if someone does not even desire it, and thinks that the things that are to be understood are only to be believed, he does not know what faith is good for; for pious faith does not wish to be without hope and love. So, then, the believer ought to believe what he does not yet see in such a way that he both hopes for and loves the vision.

Of visible things that are past and have passed away in time there is faith alone, since they are not hoped to be seen in the future but are believed as done and accomplished; for example, that Christ died once for our sins and rose again, and will die no more, and death will no longer have dominion over him. But things that are not yet but are to come, like the resurrection of our spiritual bodies, are believed in such a way that they are also hoped to be seen; but they cannot be shown in any way at present. Things that exist in such a way that they neither pass away nor are future but remain eternal are partly invisible, like justice and wisdom, and partly visible, like the now immortal body of Christ. But the invisible things are seen by being understood, and so they too are seen in a way proper to them; and when they are seen they are far more certain than the things that the senses of the body reach; but they are called invisible because they cannot be seen at all by these mortal eyes. But the permanent visible things can be seen even by these mortal eyes, if they are shown, as the Lord showed himself to the disciples after the resurrection, and also after the ascension to the apostle Paul and to the deacon Stephen.

Accordingly, we believe these permanent visible things in such a way that, even if they are not shown to us, we hope that we shall see them some day; and we do not try to comprehend them by reason and understanding, except to think of them, since they are visible, as more clearly distinct from invisible things; and when we imagine in thought what they are like, we know well enough that they are not known to us. For I think of Antioch, which I do not know, but not as I think of Carthage, which I know; my thought pictures the appearance of the one and recalls that of the other; yet I in no way doubt either what I have believed about the former on the testimony of many or what I have believed about the latter from my own sight. But justice and wisdom and whatever is of that kind we do not imagine in one way and behold in another; rather, we behold these invisible things, understood by the simple attention of mind and reason, without any bodily forms and masses, without any lineaments and shapes of limbs, without any local boundaries or infinite spaces. And that very light by which we discern all these things, in which it is sufficiently clear to us what we believe without knowing, what we hold as known, what bodily form we remember, what we picture in thought, what the bodily sense reaches, what the mind imagines like a body, what the intelligence contemplates as certain and most unlike all bodies: this light, then, in which all these things are judged, is certainly not spread round about through local spaces like the brightness of this sun and of any bodily light, illuminating our mind as with a visible whiteness; rather it shines invisibly and ineffably and yet intelligibly, and is as certain to us as the things it makes certain to us, which we behold according to it.

There are, then, three kinds of things that are seen: one of bodily things, such as heaven and earth and whatever the bodily sense perceives and touches in them; another like bodily things, such as those which we imagine when they are thought of by the spirit, or which we behold as bodies when remembered or presented to us, from which come also the visions presented in sleep or in some ecstasy of mind with these quasi-local dimensions; a third distinct from both, which is neither body nor has any likeness of body, such as wisdom, which is beheld by being understood by the mind, and in whose light all these are truly judged. In which of these kinds is the Trinity, which we wish to know, to be believed to be? Surely either in one or in none. If in one, then certainly in that which is more excellent than the other two, such as wisdom. But if his gift in us is less than that supreme and unchangeable wisdom which is called the wisdom of God (and I think we ought not to think of the giver as lower than his gift); if, I say, some splendor of it is in us, which is called our wisdom, however much of it we can grasp through a mirror and in an enigma, we must separate it both from all bodies and from all likenesses of bodies.

But if this Trinity is to be thought to be in none of these kinds, and is so invisible that it is not seen even by the mind, much less ought we to hold such an opinion of it as to believe that it is like bodily things or the images of bodily things. For it surpasses bodies not by the beauty of its mass or its magnitude but by the unlikeness and disparity of its nature; and if it is set apart from comparison with the goods of our mind, such as wisdom, justice, love, chastity, and the like, which we certainly do not weigh by bodily mass nor picture with quasi-bodily forms in thought, but, when we understand rightly, behold in the light of the mind without any corporeality or likeness of corporeality, how much more is it set apart from comparison with all bodily qualities and quantities! Yet that it is not wholly beyond our understanding the apostle is witness, when he says: “For his invisible things, from the creation of the world, are seen, being understood through the things that are made, his eternal power also and divinity.” And therefore, since the same Trinity made both body and soul, it is without doubt more excellent than both. So when the soul has been considered, especially the human soul, rational and intellectual, which was made in his image, if it does not defeat our thoughts and understanding, but we are able to grasp by mind and understanding what is chief in it, that is, the mind and understanding itself, it will perhaps not be absurd for us to try, with his help, to raise it to the understanding of its creator too. But if it fails in itself and gives way to itself, let it be content with pious faith as long as it is a pilgrim away from the Lord, until what is promised is accomplished in man by him who is able, as the apostle says, to do beyond what we ask and understand.

Since this is so, meanwhile I want you to read the many things we have already written that pertain to this question, and also those we have in hand and, because of the magnitude of so difficult a question, cannot yet complete. But for now hold with unshaken faith that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are a Trinity and yet one God; not that there is a common, as it were fourth, divinity of theirs, but that the Trinity itself is ineffably inseparable; and that the Father alone begot the Son, and the Son alone was begotten by the Father, while the Holy Spirit is the Spirit both of the Father and of the Son. And whatever bodily likeness occurs to you when you think of these things, refuse it, deny it, reject it, cast it away, flee it; for it is no small beginning of the thought of God if, before we can know what he is, we begin to know what he is not. But love understanding greatly, because even the holy Scriptures themselves, which urge faith in great things before understanding, cannot be useful to you unless you understand them rightly. For all the heretics who receive them as authoritative seem to themselves to follow them, while they rather follow their own errors; and therefore they are heretics not because they despise the Scriptures but because they do not understand them.